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Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

149 points by akudha 4y ago

Elixir, Nim, Crystal, Elm... Currently I am a JS dev, and not enjoying it at all. I looked at Elixir and Crystal, like both. But I am open to learning anything that is unlike JS at this point. How is the job market like?

bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
There are more jobs in non-niche languages. Have you checked out anything else. C#, Java, Python, PHP, Golang, Typescript are all better than js.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  Better on what dimensions? Quite the sweeping claim. Is C# better than JS for writing a web front end? It’s possible but it’s hardly better.
  - bdhcuidbebe 4y ago
    Better chances of finding a job.
- throwaway94439 4y ago
  Let me demonstrate how subjective this is with my next statement. They're all bad as none of them have algebraic data types.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Typescript almost does!
phtrivier 4y ago
The market is obeying the law of supply and demand. Hardly anyone knows those languages, and there is no big player backing them, so you have to dig inside each community to know which shop is active. For elm, you can try noredink. For f# and closure there are a bunch of Fintech. For elixir, well, if you're willing to relocate for south west France, DM me ;)
- greggyb 4y ago
  Funny you mention F# and Clojure, as these were the only contenders for a product I am building with a partner. We went with F# and are quite happy thus far.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    F# has the backing of Microsoft and the big ecosystems of .NET and JS (via Fable). This makes it the best supported niche language and a great pick.
  - phtrivier 4y ago
    What's the cross platform / native story for F# (for real) ? Can you build a relatively efficient binary that just runs and does not take an hour to open a gui window ?
    - throwaway94439 4y ago
      I had severe performance problems with F# async, but this may be fixed in F# 6.0
      - greggyb 4y ago
        I would be curious to hear more about this. My response to a sibling explains how we do not have huge performance considerations right now (and our i/o-bound nature). Due to the primary work of our product, we are utilizing async workflows extensively. We are on 6.0, and evaluating if we want to chase the 7 series release or just hop to the next LTS.
      - mdm12 4y ago
        F# 6.0 added the 'task' computation expression, which is much more performant than the F# 'async' methods. It also makes interop with C# projects and libraries simpler, as is uses the same mechanism that C#'s async/await does. I have used it in production workflows without major performance issues FWIW.
    - 4y ago
nhgiang 4y ago
There is a significant Erlang/Elixir job market in Europe and UK.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  No, there is not. Multiple sites report < 10 jobs in the uk for any of the two, while c#, java, node, python are in the thousands each.
  - japhib 4y ago
    <10 jobs is still significant.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      How's that? 10 jobs is basically a rounding error for any other category. There are orders of magnitude more Java jobs.
      - japhib 4y ago
        But there are jobs, and people work in them. I, for instance, use Elixir in my day job, and so do 100+ other engineers at my company alone. I’ve also been approached by recruiters on LinkedIn for other Elixir jobs. So yes, there is a significant amount of jobs in Elixir
- japhib 4y ago
  The Elixir job market is getting better in the US as well. I’m currently employed at a company that uses Eixir exclusively for backend, and we’ve got 100+ engineers. I’ve had multiple recruiters from other Elixir-using companies reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
jstx1 4y ago
Non-existent to a close approximation (maybe more Elixir stuff out there than the others you listed but still very rare). Learn those languages if you’re interested and curious but if the goal is to get a job with a new to you language, stay as far away as possible from them. Not only are there very few jobs but also the niche languages will distract you from learning stuff that’s in demand.
- bees_buzz 4y ago
  If you go looking for elixir stuff it’s there, and it seems like its usage in industry is expanding at a steady pace. IMO this is because it’s a reasonably approachable language designed to solve a common difficult problem (high concurrency, fault tolerance at scale)
  - lord-squirrel 4y ago
    +1, elixir is being used in a lot of cool places and only growing. For example at discord, their chat infrastructure is built with elixir. https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  It really amazes me how often I see this fallacy. The total amount of supply doesn't matter much. What matters (both for the employer and the job-seeker) is the ratio of supply to demand. E.g., let's say JavaScript has the most demand of any language and there are 2 zillion job openings. This sounds great for job seekers initially, but what if there are 5 zillion JS devs seeking jobs? In that case job hunting might be very difficult. Similarly if there are 100 remote positions open in Pony, but only 10 Pony devs available to fill them, job hunting might not be so difficult. There are some liquidity advantages in absolute scale, but for the most part it's the ratio of supply to demand that matters and not the raw numbers.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    Niche language means fewer companies to pick from. If I don’t like any of them, what do I care how desperate they are?
enraged_camel 4y ago
We write Elixir at my current job.
- akudha 4y ago
  Could you share some more details? What kind of project is it? Did/do you hire your team who already knew Elixir, or did they learn on the job?
  - japhib 4y ago
    At my current company we’ve got 100+ engineers writing Elixir. Fintech in the US. Almost none of them know Elixir when hired.
    - Shorel 4y ago
      This is the right approach.
oneplane 4y ago
In my experience the job market just revolves around business needs combined with transferrable skills for an affordable price. Most business needs are a cheap version of CRUD+Business Rules. As a result, the biggest languages (keep in mind that most businesses have large amounts of existing code) are also relatively old (except Go, C# and Swift which are relatively young). Languages I see with my current clients and have seen with former clients and employers (medium to large organisations): - Java (Including Scala, Kotlin and Groovy) - C and C++ (usually both are found at the same company) - Python - JavaScript (including TypeScript) - Web stuff like HTML and CSS (but that's mostly generated now) - Go - Swift (and Objective-C, mostly iOS development, some tvOS and macOS) - C# be it modern or some classic ASP.NET - A bunch of application-specific languages, Apex/PL-SQL/TSQL/X++ Besides "we already have it" there is the hiring pool problem. If you need to find someone for one of the above languages, the pools are generally big and available enough to find a suitable candidate in a month or two. And as such, if someone leaves you know you'll be able to replace hem. If a platform or application demands a specific language, that's used, but otherwise it's all just availability of people and institutional knowledge. For your specific languages you might be able to find work at niche sectors like telecom appliance manufacturers, defense or academic institutions. Edit: and Rust, which like Go, is young (but even younger) yet gaining quite some traction. Also forgot Python for a second there.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I agree with your overall point. I think the outlier might be Rust. Somehow it's managing to gain traction despite the headwinds you mention.
  - frogulis 4y ago
    I guess it fills a niche that companies really need filled
    - ghaff 4y ago
      A lot of it's legacy but there's a lot of C/C++ out there. So something that can be used as a system-level language and that also (for the most part) has memory safety is going to be of interest to quite a few people even if they have to learn a new language.
BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
the fact that you used the word “niche” suggests that you’re already know the answer to your question
joe8756438 4y ago
What is it about js you dont like? is it really about the language? a lot of the complaints i hear about js have more to do with “the community”, “the team”, “the application”. here’s the thing: there is _so much_ built in js. i think theres a better chance you find what you want in a mainstream language (js or otherwise), but you first have to identify what your values are.
- egberts1 4y ago
  The biggest detractor of JavaScript isn't so much about its language’s: - lack of strong typing (unlike Ada), - lack of a standard framework (VueJS, NodeJS, Angular, React, Ember, Mithril, Aurelia, Backbone, Polymer) - lack of consistent control of packaging (embedded or HTTP[S]), - lack of consistent naming convention (wild west of competing function names, unlike libc library to name one language), - lack of unit testing (JS? nah), - lack of correctness for thread procedure theorem (unlike Nim, Ada), - lack of memory access security (unlike Rust), - lack of JMP/goto at lower intermediate representation (LIR) level (unlike many programming languages) thus making direct LLVM more difficult and the least portable. - lack of robust error handling (unlike many) JavaScript is a runaway language with not much forethoughts being put into server-side security that continues to must have - a wider access to local filesystems, - a large, shareable memory block capability set that allows for JIT switching between executable and writing, heap-spraying for kernel addresses, SPECTRE-like capabilitiies (that will continue to be fileless malwares’ favorite haunting ground for decades to come). JS did however introduce a “stack-less” just-in-time compiler that is small enough to get embedded into so many things (my pet peeve is JS of LG smart-TV that is still borked to this day) that no one single anti-virus company can ever hope to cover all those bases. But it’s common, and wide-spread, thus got its adoption rate going for it (much like BASIC variants did during multiple decades) but it sure ain’t going to be healthy. Of course, just flapping off my mouth here toward the incoming tsunami of flotsam against my hardcore cybersecurity values.
  - fendy3002 4y ago
    I don't get most of your complains related with embedded capability or security as you've said. I'm not undermining the importance of security, but javascript is not the good language to use when you have good security in mind / to be embedded. It's like using PHP for machine learning. Sure it can works but you'll find that the language is bad (or at least is not the best if compared to some language) at it. Certainly the vast adaptation of it is an issue (like electron), but it's more on the companies side than the language itself. Hopefully there will be other javascript or typescript engine that's more suitable for backend / embedded.
msh 4y ago
As others have said very small, especially for someone not an expert in those languages. It should be done more for interest and generally broadening your skills to make you a better developer. If you want to learn a new language to get a different kind of job start by considering what kind of job you want and then learn the most used languages in that bracket. Like c/c++ for game dev jobs, Objective C/Swift for iPhone development, java/kotlin for android and so on. For more generic dev jobs the answer would be that Java or C# would be a good place to start.
jasfi 4y ago
It's not good for Nim, unfortunately. The language is great, but the community isn't that big. If you're looking for a web framework with an ORM for Nim, check out Nexus: https://github.com/jfilby/nexus https://github.com/jfilby/nexus
- Stevvo 4y ago
  I've heard good things from guys working with Nim at Nimbus/Status; precisely because the community isn't that big they have great communication with the language maintainers and can even influence future language features/development. But that is predicated on you finding a job first!
a6chris 4y ago
I wondered similar, though for Elixir not for Crystal. For the UK jobs market: https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/elixir https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/elixir https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/nim https://highestpayingjobs.co.uk/it/nim Fair warning, it's my site - was an experiment in learning NextJS so fairly rough around the edges. I will add Crystal when back home.
- dom96 4y ago
  where are you getting the jobs data from? I'm surprised there are this many Nim jobs tbh
  - a6chris 4y ago
    yeah... tbh it's looking like a bodge on my part :( It's scraped data from four UK jobs boards, de-duped where possible but as above it's rough. Having just searched the jobs boards manually, I can see "nim" comes back with "National Intelligence Model (NIM)", so for sure that will be a false positive. Sorry :(
    - jasfi 4y ago
      There's also IBM's Network Installation Management (NIM).
blocked_again 4y ago
Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving. Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Although true for the job, this is a bit disingenuous for getting the job market because recruiters are absolutely not thinking of you as a problem solver with language being just one of the tools.
- dom96 4y ago
  Precisely. Any good company won't care what programming language you are specifically proficient in. They care about how proficient you are in learning new things. I have created a lot of Nim projects and implemented much of its stdlib. My full-time job isn't using Nim, but the experience I gained through my work in Nim has helped my career significantly.
  - akudha 4y ago
    Any good company The keyword here is good. Even then, this isn’t largely true. It is quite hard to convince companies to hire for a skill that you already don’t have experience in. In most cases, there are gatekeepers - those lovely recruiters who don’t know the difference between a computer and a washing machine.
    - dom96 4y ago
      if you're optimising for those then you might as well learn whatever's most in-demand and popular, probably Python. There are plenty of companies that are good enough though, for most you won't even need to talk to a recruiter.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Given two good candidates, they are going to prefer candidates who are already proficient in their tech stack. It saves time.
blablabla123 4y ago
The jobs where niche language are used (not necessarily exclusively) seem to me more interesting but might bring other downsides like very small teams. Also if you used such languages previously, chances are the next place you start turns out to also use a niche language somewhere or be open to it. The most uncommon tech is usually not even listed in the job ad and will only be seen a few months into the job...
- egberts1 4y ago
  Ive found that Nim has an interesting way of doing string handling, as if it is some kind of Polish notational aspect. Take part of a CSV parser, for example: if @[ ‘,’ ].split(my_string)
  - Tiberium 4y ago
    I think you just found someone's bad code, because first of all, an efficient CSV parser would not use `split` with `if` because then the program will have to split the whole string and store all split'd string in a sequence temporarily, but second of all, Nim has method call syntax (so-called UFCS in some other languages) - https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#procedures-method-call-syntax https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#procedures-method-call..., so the code you wrote can just be if my_string.split(@[',']) or even (because we only split by 1 char, we don't need a sequence): if my_string.split(',') That said, you didn't paste the whole string of code as this expression is non-sensical - Nim doesn't have the same "truthiness" as Python, so if you wanted to check if there's at least two strings as a result of a split, you'd write it as if my_string.split(',').len > 1: # do stuff
sorentwo 4y ago
There are ample Elixir jobs out there, and lots of companies hiring. For a quick check of relative popularity, open the past couple monthly “Who’s Hiring” here and search for “Elixir.” The community is thriving and growing.
shaftoe444 4y ago
I program backend Java Spring CRUD stuff. I love learning (and building) niche languages in my own time but I would always be suspicious of using these in real production. Need a really compelling case not to use something boring that just works when your job is on the line.
auslegung 4y ago
I’ve had 4 engineering jobs in 5.5 years. Two have been Elm/Haskell jobs. It took a couple of months of light searching to find my current Elm/Haskell job. Setup alerts on job sites, join appropriate subreddits, Slack teams, Discord servers, language-specific job sites, etc. You will find a lot more jobs than you might expect.
- roguas 4y ago
  Slacks/discord and internal communities are in fact really good place to look (it was not intuitive to me till recently). Often times its the other dev that is posting info, there is possibility for some casual interaction "what you workin on?". It is way cheaper for the company to hire also (cutting all job posts, agencies etc).
- 71a54xd 4y ago
  Damn, how've you managed your reputation hopping so often?
ptttr 4y ago
I do definitely recommend Clojure - I've switched to it in 2019 coming from Rails and JS and never looked back. Clojure's job market is great, there's no shortage of offers, even for newcomers and it has been the top paying lang in stackoverflow surveys for years https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... However, the most important part is that Clojure is a very powerful piece of technology that made me reevaluate what software engineering really is. You can efficiently use Clojure for both backend and frontend with easy access to libraries from JVM and npm so you will never run into the problem, common in other niche langs, of too few libraries. Nevertheless, Clojure's own ecosystem is filled with many great, cutting-edge ideas that you wouldn't find working so well elsewhere. The community is very welcoming, growing and diverse with people coming from all different programming backgrounds - all sharing the disillusionment with other programming languages and determination to find and build a better way. https://jobs-blog.braveclojure.com/2022/03/24/long-term-clojure-benefits.html https://jobs-blog.braveclojure.com/2022/03/24/long-term-cloj...
- casion 4y ago
  I can second this. I've worked in the industry in academia, enterprise and industrial. Switching to Clojure not only has me at my highest salary ever, but I'm consistently working with some of the best people I've met in my entire career. The community is incredible, the job market is open and the people who seem to be attracted to the ecosystem are fantastic engineers and generally great people. 30 years as a professional dev, and I've never been happier.
- patrickthebold 4y ago
  I love clojure, and would love a clojure job, BUT my hesitation comes from the companies choosing clojure or any niche language. Choosing a niche language seems like a very risky move, to me. My fear is that that its a small company and someone senior and technical (CTO?) just wants to have fun in a new cool language because they are bored. Don't get me wrong, I also want to have fun in a new cool language because I'm bored, but that's not a good decision for a company to pick that as a tool. Anyway, I'm worried that the culture is not entirely practical in their technical decisions, and that's my hesitation.
emerongi 4y ago
I was looking for Elixir jobs a few months ago. For me the number of opportunities was good enough, since the nature of the jobs was also more unique and interesting to me. Obviously nowhere near what you see with Java/JS/etc, but with those you also have to do a lot of work to figure out if the job would even be interesting to you, making the job search more stressful. I didn't need to do hundreds of interviews (like I've seen others do) and instead just picked between a few cool companies. It was quick and easy and I found a place that I so far love.
compumike 4y ago
I’m only guessing, but the best path for Crystal might be to find a Ruby job (which are relatively plentiful!) and, if/when a situation arises where you need an especially high-performance microservice/component, you might be able to suggest bringing in Crystal to the team.
AnthonBerg 4y ago
For what it’s worth, I had a job writing ReasonML / ReScript. It was a good job!
ydnaclementine 4y ago
PG has a really old (2004) blog about how python programmers are smarter than other programmers. Basically it comes down to the python programmers being ahead of the curve by learning a less popular language (at the time), and they must be using python because they believe helps build better software or whatever. Meaning they're less likely to simply be 9-5 programmers just doing it for the money, but will have opinions on language X or design pattern Y. I would imagine the python programmers had programmed in java prior, and were able to see the downsides to java versus python, so they had the full experience of why the old tool didn't work and how the new one solves some of those pain points. PG blog because he says it much, much better: http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
japhib 4y ago
I’ve been working at a job that uses exclusively Elixir for backend work, for 100+ engineers. I’ve gotten multiple messages on LinkedIn from recruiters from other companies that also use Elixir. So I can’t speak about those other languages, but the Elixir job market is strong. Seems like there’s a lot of listings if you just Google “elixir jobs.” There are also a few dedicated sites such as https://elixirjobs.net/ https://elixirjobs.net/
- lawik 4y ago
  As an active community participant and freelance Elixir dev I've been dipping my toe in helping companies recruit Elixir devs and helping devs find good Elixir jobs. There is more of both parties than I could possibly address and exhaust. All the elixir devs I know with experience are thriving. It is a niche and I find it a healthy one, significant and growing. If anyone wants to get into Elixir I'm happy to give it a whirl. My site has my contact info.
pjmlp 4y ago
Unless you're at a startup using them, hardly noticeable. It is better to pick languages based on platforms than the other way around.
542458 4y ago
I work for an established medium sized company that is always looking for Delphi Pascal programmers for a realtime directX graphics application. Not surprisingly, this skillset can be hard to find in 2022.
GuB-42 4y ago
Does language really matter? Any experienced programmers should be able to pick up any language in a matter of days if he knows the underlying concepts. Similarly, the language is not what makes a job interesting. I mean, what don't you like about JS? Is it the syntax or is it the environment? The code base? The framework? Maybe web dev is not for you? Maybe you are asked to do thing you personally disagree with (ex: ads). Language rarely was the main thing that defined the project, though there are correlations: if you are doing JS, you are probably doing web dev, with a higher chance of front-end work. But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed. If you want something different to JS, why not try good old C instead of niche languages? It has a significant job market, you will learn about memory management, and get your foot into embedded, high performance, and system programming, far from the world of JS. These skills will translate into the other (niche or not) languages you may use next. Even in high level languages, having an idea of how that works on a lower level is a good thing.
- lkschubert8 4y ago
  I think "any experienced programmers should be able to pick up a language in a few days" is true for a lot of surface level things, but expertise is entirely different. A language isn't just the syntax and runtine, but the idioms, patterns, package ecosystem, and tooling that surround it, which you will likely not learn in a few days.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Is it really expected to be able to learn even the syntax and runtime in "a few days". I've been using Javascript for 20 years and I'm still learning new things (though it helps that the language keeps changing)
    - lkschubert8 4y ago
      Yeah it's probably more accurate to say "learn enough of the syntax and runtime to write/edit code in a few days".
hestefisk 4y ago
I can tell you the next big thing is Perl … that’s where the money is…
999900000999 4y ago
I'll echo much of what others have said, once you become a decent software engineer, the language shouldn't be a deal-breaker. Deal-breaker It does make onboarding much easier though, for example, if I join a shop that uses NodeJS I'm not going to have to ask for help getting set up. If I join a C++ shop...
Areading314 4y ago
poor
2c2c2c 4y ago
Elixir is at a different level than the other languages you've listed. I learned and built stuff for fun using Elixir around 6 years ago while in college, and dropped it on my resume in the pile of technologies I know around then. In the past 2 years, as my yoe hit 5 years, I now get the hoard of specialized Elixir recruiters who filter by 'elixir' and '5 yoe'. These amount to 75%+ of the people who contact me about jobs. A lot of startups fully bought into elixir+phoenix over the years. Most of these companies would have probably been better off using node or something, but they do exist.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  Curious what your TC was and # of employees. Were they all startups or were there any established companies hiring Elixir/Phoenix ? The technology is very interesting but I find that it has the same issues as clojure: limited talent pool, questionable cost/productivity gains. LiveWire is very interesting but its now emulated to a large degree in other more popular languages enough that I could put off learning Phoenix and opt for a more modular solution with popular languages.
  - 2c2c2c 4y ago
    I've never taken any of the offers and have never used Elixir in a professional context. Most of these are small startups and can range from 100-200k + equity, and the only decision behind using elixir was probably the novelty, not beam or the success stories behind discord and whatsapp suggesting its utility for at scale throughput
    - yomkippur 4y ago
      yeah the novelty aspect of tech is always very alluring. still remember building on top of Meteor.js and thinknig 'this is it, this is the future'
eckza 4y ago
I just got my first job as a full-time Elm (and Haskell) developer a few months ago... and it's been an incredible experience. Those of us who love this language and want to see it succeed are highly invested in creating more Elm jobs. Jobs pop up in the #jobs channel pretty often in the Elm Slack. I interviewed for several before finding the perfect fit. http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/ http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/
biztos 4y ago
If you just want something "unlike JS" it should be pretty easy to figure out which languages are in demand and pick the one (or two) that most appeal to you. If you're particularly into obscure languages, I suggest getting involved with the language community (meetups, open-source projects, etc) because for the less-popular languages the community and the employers have a lot of overlap.
eschneider 4y ago
There are definitely positions out there, but they're not always obvious. I picked up an new embedded/backend job at the beginning of the year and they mentioned "Oh, we're doing a lot of new development in Elixir, you cool with that?" towards the end of the interviewing process. Wasn't ever in the job description before I was hired... And yes, most of the new development has been in Elixir, when it makes sense. :)
neilv 4y ago
This question is dear to my heart, having been a pre-popularity adopter of a few language ecosystems that did and didn't become popular (including C++, Java, and Scheme/Racket). You can search job listings on LinkedIn, Angel.co, etc. But if it's only a small number of search hits, also consider the possibility that even some of those might not be genuine opportunities, so you have to look at each one. Examples of why: * A hiring manager/lead is an enthusiast of the fringe tech., and the kinds of people it attracts, but not actually using it. Or not an enthusiast, but has heard it's a way to get the attention of some of the best developers. (I have done this, and been clear about it.) * Startup (maybe more likely to choose fringe tech because the tech cofounder happens to know/like it) that is trying to look like they're doing well enough to be in a position to hire, when they're not yet. * Recruiters trying to keep the funnel full, so candidates ready as soon as openings available. * Mandated postings, when the org already knows it wants to hire or promote a particular person, so that person's resume gets turned into an overly-specific job post. * (I've not confirmed this one in the wild, but it's similar to other growth hacking, and you could see how it might appeal in a market heavy with resume-driven development.) Promoting some tool or platform by faking job posts for it. Note that this doesn't mean the fringe platform is without merit, and sometimes the merit is self-defeating. The norm in one fringe ecosystem I was involved with, on the rare occasion an established company used it, was for one super-productive person to quietly do a team's worth of work, and... the org never really needed to hire more. (And if that established company got refocused on faster growth, then an MBA is probably going to think they need to switch to a more popular platform, so that they can hire a large number of people "who can hit the ground running", fast.) Maybe also relevant: consider the risks of investing career in a fringe ecosystem, which was the topic of my first Ask HN post (from an engineering lead ethical perspective): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655604
kshahkshah 4y ago
No one seems to have mentioned this at the top level... TypeScript can make a large JavaScript codebase a lot more manageable and fun in my opinion. I second Clojure if you're specifically looking for niche. If you goal though is to be highly employable I'd suggest Python
sterlind 4y ago
There's a lot of niche languages for niche specialties. Like Ada/Spark for aviation/defense/safety-critical systems, Coq and Isabelle for formal verification, FORTRAN and Julia for scientific computing, Mathematica for pure/applied math, Prolog for logic programming/planning/expert systems, R for stats, MiniZinc and TLA+ for modeling, Racket for compiler work, etc. Ideas in these fields come through clearer/more cleanly in these languages. Learning the language is easy, the field is harder, but ideas of the field are reflected in the language.
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  I'd love to work with Ada some time. The language I find most interesting.
tikhonj 4y ago
My experience has been that roles in less popular languages are rare but they also substantially help match up candidates and interesting opportunities. I've been interested in functional programming and Haskell since college and it's specifically helped me get roles I would not have gotten otherwise: • I got an internship at Jane Street thanks to my Haskell and OCaml experience—I doubt I would have been considered at a similar company like Two Sigma • I got onto a cool operations research/AI team at Target thanks to my Haskell experience—I wouldn't have considered them and they wouldn't have considered me without it • at Target, I saw first-hand how using a non-standard language massively helped with recruiting highly skilled engineers
gorgoiler 4y ago
If you get a kick out of neat technology then you should be able to build your own cool stuff — libraries, tools, and the like — without needing to reach for a particular language. I work on a large and boring Python codebase and I don’t need niche technologies to scratch my CS / hacker itches — healing technical debt with carefully considered redesigns that delete thousands of lines of code and produce v2 of something with 10x the usefulness is what gets me excited about work. Do you like cooking, and have you heard of Keith Floyd? He was famous in the 1980s for pioneering the travel cooking TV show, getting out of the studio and cooking on location in borrowed kitchens of French farmers, fisherman’s galleys, firesides in the outdoors as well as whichever corner of a professional kitchen he could beg or borrow. He brought French cuisine to life, on screen in situ, by working with what he had available to him and making of it what he could, all with good humour and excellent results. It’s a nice metaphor for producing business results no matter what kind of facilities you have available: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NzR9vgCIkU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NzR9vgCIkU
mongol 4y ago
I think you have a better chance lobbying for using those at a workplace, than you being hired for those skills explicitly.
sam0x17 4y ago
I built up Kagi's team and initial infrastructure in Crystal, and though I'm no longer with them I will say they are chugging along.
ralmidani 4y ago
Lots of great discussion around supply vs. demand. As an Elixir dev, I will add that it being a niche language is also beneficial from a cultural standpoint. I want to work at a place where devs are encouraged to tinker and explore cutting-edge technologies. Not to mention a generally more forward-thinking culture, at least on the dev side. “Established” technologies like Java make me think traditional, top-down, “butts-in-seats” kinds of companies. Of course, this can’t be generalized, but I think there is at least some correlation. Besides, using enterprise Java is, at least for me, soul-crushing in and of itself.

banashark 4y ago

I've been developing F# things on linux for close to a decade now (though my last official position doing so was ~7 years ago, it's just my default hobby language that I know best). I have zero trouble developing on linux. Building GUI or non-GUI software works fine. I use Rider and work on web systems, a handful of scrapers that feed some data I collect, as well as various small GUI systems. I think F# might have _the highest number of viable ways_ to build a GUI application if that's what you're looking for. You can go the fable (F# -> JS transpiler) route and use any of the js tools (electron, nodegui, etc). The popular one's (react, preact, svelte, etc) have type definitions that folks have already written. F# works with most of the dotnet gui libraries just fine, though I don't know for sure the story about winui, but from people I know working on production systems using it, they recommend to avoid it. So you've still got WPF, etc. For the newer cross-plat stuff, there is Avalonia, Uno Platform, Xamarin (with the natives) or the newer version MAUI. --- The thing here is that there aren't really limitations to almost all of the things I've listed above. Transpilation targets work fine, as do the dotnet targets. Almost every one of these also has "Elmish" frameworks (Functional Reactive Programming state management) suited for the purpose: * React -> Elmish + Feliz * Avalonia -> Avalonia.FuncUI * MAUI -> Fabulous etc --- I've never felt constrained building GUIs in F#, other than some of the dumpster fire that was Xamarin.Forms and the Xamarin build tools (native targets never gave me any problems that I can remember). I took a partial Fabulous 1.0 (Xamarin Forms) application that I had only worked a couple days on, and out of anger with Xamarin build tools lifted and shifted to a react-native application. Almost my entire elmish (view-logic layer) was preserved, and I just had to change the view elements out from Xamarin.Forms elements to React Native elements. --- I don't work with F# too much in an official capacity these days, but it's a decent tool to have as a default.

oneplane 4y ago

Oh, that's right, I knew I forgot one! It's even gaining traction in ML for some reason, we've been using it in an image processing pipeline because performance and safety-wise it simply had the best results. Edit: I even forgot to list Python. Maybe I should just look up some language popularity list and use that instead.

ghaff 4y ago
This is a pretty widely-quoted list. https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/03/28/language-rankings-1-22/ https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/03/28/language-rankings-1-2...
czbond 4y ago
For Rust and ML, are the tooling libraries available to any quantity in Rust that are present in Python? I was under the impression Python has such an advance runaway any other languages will be hard to catchup (eg: Go has been trying, R <ugh>, etc)
- microtonal 4y ago
  There are obviously fewer ML libraries than for Python (sometimes worse quality, sometimes better), but if you are willing to invest time, it's definitely doable. E.g. I made a multi-task transformer-based syntax annotator in Rust using the tch Torch binding: https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot In my current job I do NLP with Python, Cython, and some C++. I don't think implementing ML stuff in Rust was much more work. Once you are beyond the stage of implementing a small research project or toy model, most systems are going to contain a lot of custom, specialized code. You will have to do that work in any language.
  - czbond 4y ago
    Thank you for the informed response - really helpful
- qchris 4y ago
  The most comprehensive current view of the Rust machine learning ecosystem at the moment is probably at https://www.arewelearningyet.com/ https://www.arewelearningyet.com/ (I sometimes help maintain this site) Rust has a weird mix at the moment, and not one that's likely to significantly change within the next 12 months, at least. Certain tools are genuinely best-in-class, especially around simple operations on insane amounts of data. Rust kills it in that space due to its native speed and focus on concurrency. There's also growing projects like Linfa [1]. that while not at the level of scikit-learn, have significantly increased their coverage on common data science/classical ML problems in the past couple years, along with improved tooling. The space does have a few pure-Rust projects coming down the pipeline around autodifferentiation, GPU compute, etc. that are likely to yield some really valuable results in deep learning, but that aren't quite available and will take some time to pick up some traction even once they're released. At the same time, areas like data visualization are unlikely to reach parity with something like matplotlib/pyplot in the near future. Python is the de-facto standard, and will be for some time, but Rust's ability to build accessible high-level APIs on top of performant, language-native libraries is attracting some attention and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing ingress in the certain areas over the next few years, where instead of the Python/C++ combination, it's just Rust all the way down. [1] https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa https://github.com/rust-ml/linfa
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  > R <ugh> You may not like R (and I do totally understand that), but it's probably ahead of Python in specialised statistical (i.e. non unstructured ML) tools and packages. Python is definitely better if you want to interact with a GPU and/or do "modern ML" (i.e. neural nets).
  - czbond 4y ago
    The ugh was a personal comment. I learned programming OO style (C++) and can go as far as scripted - but R seems like a Math professor went on an acid trip and made a language.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      Yeah, I get it. I learned R first, so I was really irritated by all the OO/mutable state stuff in Python when I learned it. I guess it's what you learn first that shapes your mind the most.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

I used to think this way and wound up completely exhausted in my career. Coming from web dev, I used to volunteer to dive into a Objective C repo to fix some random bug in a mobile app and then a week later my boss would ask me to build a big feature in that app. I'd spend a few weeks getting up to speed on the language and build the feature, and then I would never use what I learned again. My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. In hindsight, I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again. I definitely learned some good lessons and recognized some patterns along the way, but I think the "just pick it up and learn it" attitude contributes to poor code quality in a commercial context since jobs usually time-box things. I'm a fan of picking something up that I can get expert feedback from, which there again, requires expertise.

rco8786 4y ago
> I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again. Don’t think of it this way. Learning new tools is almost never a waste of time, you just don’t know when you’ll need the lessons learned next. But you will.
- mmartinson 4y ago
  It's valuable to consider the opportunity cost of this compared to a deepened knowledge of an already productive tool
- rolisz 4y ago
  It depends. Maybe the alternative is to get better at a tool you already know. Maybe you can be a jack of all trades, master of none, or you can go really deep into only 2-3 things. It depends a lot on your personality I think.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  What lessons do I learn from learning webpack? Or whatever the new way of bundling things in FE is called now? Compare that to understanding C or UNIX. There are skills that decay much slower than others.
  - biztos 4y ago
    Maybe it's counterintuitive, but I think the "jack of all trades" role should be given to someone who's very senior, but isn't focused on career advancement. It sounds like you got stuck learning more trivial things before you had a good foundation in something more substantial (like C or UNIX). If it weren't for the rampant ageism in the industry, that job might be a perfect fit for someone in their 60s who has already written a few million lines of C and is happy to help less experienced people just get unblocked. Instead it often falls to the "junior senior" because the "senior seniors" are all pushing 30 and need to work on portable skills. (Just my observation of the industry, maybe your own case was different.)
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Compare that to understanding C or UNIX. There are skills that decay much slower than others. Correct! Knowledge around C, Linux, CPUs and optimization last many decades. Knowledge of tools and libraries in high-churn languages last years at best.
    - EddySchauHai 4y ago
      I've found a lot more career happiness with focusing on a long-term domain (networking), long-term expertise (testing), and a stable tech stack (python, c, etc). Got pretty close to burnout chasing the latest libraries in the latest languages a few years ago but now I'm very happy making sure the product is cutting edge but the tech stack is stable.
      - weatherlite 4y ago
        This is what I'm trying to do as well now (move from full stack web dev to something more in the lines of what you're describing). Any tips you can remember on how to make the move?
        EddySchauHai 4y ago
        I spent a bit of time practicing these tech stacks in my own time and fitting them into prior jobs where I could, but honestly it’s worth just getting out there and applying.
        weatherlite 4y ago
        What is your role now (just curious), what do u mean by testing? And what was your prior experience before making this move?
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    As a fellow webpack victim, the new way of bundling things in FE is esbuild and it's better in every way - faster, simpler to configure, easier to understand... and did I mention faster? my god it's so much faster. Your point about wasting your finite life dealing with webpack still stands, but just want everyone to know that there is a ray of light in frontend.
BryanBeshore 4y ago
Having done the merry go round of different languages, it also feels great gaining expertise in an individual language and to utilize new (release) capabilities of that the language.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  Absolutely. Conversely, it's frustrating to deal with a build and release system that's subpar compared to what you're used to working with, but I recognize some folks probably feel that way about my preferred tools. That's just where I've chosen to invest my time I guess. I was shocked at how hellish compiling and releasing a large iOS app was compared to deploying a web service, not to mention setting up the development environment and installing dependencies.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Yep, if I never have to deal with an automated CI/CD pipeline for iOS again (especially trying to reliably run unit tests - the simulator is flaky as hell) I'll be very happy. I don't even mind the MacOS-only requirement so much (though it does suck), but Apple's tendency to constantly force breaking changes on you is just an endless source of pain (by force I mean, release to App Store not permitted unless you build with version X of Xcode, which requires version Y of MacOS which is incompatible with version just-about-anything-else or everything else you're using.)
rtlfe 4y ago
That's pretty excessive. I've switched languages whenever I get a new job, every 2-5 years. I think this is more what OP had in mind.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  How do you switch languages during a job search? Are you avoiding companies with language requirements (four years Ruby)? Do you run into language/framework tests and/or homework assignments in languages you are unfamiliar with?
  - rtlfe 4y ago
    I've interviewed at probably 15+ companies over the last decade, and none of them had language requirements or tests. Honestly I see those things as red flags. If you can find somebody with good problem solving skills and proficiency in any language, they'll be able to pick up your language no problem.
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      "they'll be able to pick up your language no problem." That still takes time. If someone is already experienced in an (complex) ecosystem, he or she will be way more effective in it, than someone who has just general skills. I guess I am a very good problem solver. But if I suddenly would have to do a C++ project with all its footguns, I am not aware of (last time I coded in C++ was in university)? I would suck in it for quite a while. This would not be effective at all, unless I would want to change my skillset to the C++ ecosystem.
      - rtlfe 4y ago
        > That still takes time. Yes. I want to work somewhere that shows they're committed to the long term, not somewhere that's focused on how much I'll get done in my first week.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      I'm guessing that's not typical for most devs and most job openings. Recruiters in particular seem to assume they need to find devs experienced with particular stacks, and for companies who need to quickly re-fill roles after losing staff, a good dev with experience in the stack/ecosystem you've been working with is always going to get up to speed faster than one without that experience. I'd also say convincing hiring managers that specific libraries/ platforms/languages/tools that you've been using shouldn't be listed as "must have"'s in a JD is hard.
sys_64738 4y ago
> My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. There is power in saying No.
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  There is power in saying "Yes, for this price" too. Explain the problem and the damage to your mental health if you do that, hence the price.
  - afarrell 4y ago
    Your first sentence is correct. Your second sentence would be better revised to "Explain the problem and the fact that the client will be signing on for a long timeline and high level of schedule-risk. Then work at a pace which does not damage your mental health."
zinodaur 4y ago
an edit I would make to > think of yourself as a problem solver, rather than a programmer of a specific language would be to > steer away from problems that are boring to you E.g., there are very cool programs being written in Objective C, so I wouldn't write off a job just because it was in Objective C
zerr 4y ago
Sounds like a dream job! No joke.
kevinmchugh 4y ago
There are organizations that generate forgotten apps that are basically used but unmaintained. These are tarpits for developers. You don't want to be the person they fling at every forgotten codebase. They tend to be sideshows - if they really brought in the money, or the users, the business would invest in them and have people who know the language. There's value in being able to go in, fix a little problem, and make things better for your customers. But you have to balance that against becoming the guy who works on the unimportant projects. That's real bad. If there's growth potential for the forgotten app, you have to get buy-in from the business and not just sideline yourself away from the things people care about. Often these tarpits were contractually mandated. One customer wants a particular integration, so a developer builds it, and it works for the customer and everything is fine until another customer comes along wanting a similar integration and now the original dev is gone.
- sdoering 4y ago
  I know from quite a few traditional corporations, especially banks that have very central old systems that they pay people enormous day rates to maintain. But the question would be if one wants to be the go to guy for keeping old cobol things running.
  - szundi 4y ago
    The value of any other stuff you learn other than solving problems has half life. If you can be paid extra for Cobol stuff for a decade or two, then why not use this opportunity and get up to speed in 2-3 years after that. If you have just a bit of bad luck, you may have a carreer with no real deep involvement with anything, not even talking about the fact that the language is just one aspect of your productivity.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    You could call the general skill "software archaeology".
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Refactoring old codebases into something nice to work on is comfy though. It’s basically what I do in the startup world I just use less niche languages. Although I’d suspect there isn’t a lot of refactoring going on in some of those code bases you describe.
jjice 4y ago
> Coming from web dev, I used to volunteer to dive into a Objective C repo to fix some random bug in a mobile app The thing about this is that this isn't just a language change, this is an ecosystem change. It's one thing to go from writing Python based web apps to Ruby based ones, because web dev has a lot of concepts that will apply no matter the language. Objective C might be something you can pick up no problem, but having the learn all about mobile development and that ecosystem is a much larger task, and I could absolutely see that getting exhausting if you're hopping from web, to mobile, to desktop, to embedded, etc. Ecosystem switching requires a lot more of a knowledge shift than just a language does, IMO.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  I'd agree with that. I even think the difference between frontend JS development and backend JS development is bigger than, say, backend Java and JS development. But managers, even ones with tech backgrounds, tend to assume the language is the key skill. A good developer should be able to master a couple of different ecosystems given enough time but expecting them to constantly jump between them is never going to lead to great results.
Aperocky 4y ago
> contributes to poor code quality I have another perspective, I think code quality are pretty uniform across languages, either all of ones code quality is poor or it will be fine across all language one writes. Most of the code quality stems from logically dividing the building blocks and making it readable. Hence it should be logically traceable and uses the basics whenever possible. This is good, readable code. Obviously some languages demands greater knowledge (e.g. C, Haskell) to master and use appropriately but they are a minority.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  I strongly disagree. It's very visible when someone is trying to write (eg) Python in C++ or vice versa, in a way that can substantially harm readability.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Yeah I agree. I know growing and learning is the job. But how much am I going to use X in the future? I did one project in PHP. Just enough to learn I don't really like working in PHP. Is a few months of PHP experience useful in later job searches?
winternett 4y ago
I can't tell you how often a huge and expensive Oracle DB app design project turned into just emailing spreadsheets instead... That would get me fired.. -Senior Developers Everwhere. :P

Nextgrid 4y ago

While the basic syntax is relatively easy, knowledge of APIs (whether standard or third-party libraries), design patterns and conventions takes time (and practice) to master regardless of skill level. Being an expert at a single general-purpose language will often make you more productive as you can focus on the business problem at hand rather than spreading yourself thin across different languages where you'll perform worse until you become an expert at them (which is unlikely for anything more than a handful of languages and even that requires working with them regularly).

jghn 4y ago
Deep expertise isn't as useful day to day as we often portray. With a little elbow grease one can get to a place of being more than baseline productive in relatively short order. Depending on the language I expect a reasonably good dev to be able to be "fluent" in the range of a few weeks to a few months. And it's not like they'd be useless the entire time before that happens. To me, that's a reasonable investment to make. Edit: This does require a certain persona in the space of "reasonably good dev". People who have spent their entire life focusing on a single language or paradigm are a lot less likely to be able to shift gears. People who have broad exposure to different concepts are more able to say "How do I do X in Y?" and stop fighting their new language.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  I've seen huge differences in productivity between people who've been working with a given stack with for years vs months. The quality just isn't even close. Recently I outsourced a project to two groups of people. A jr dev who had 2 years of experience but all of that experience was with the tech stack, and 2 sr devs (10 yrs experience) who had < 6 months experience with the tech stack. And the jr dev (who was an inferior dev in general) blew them out of the water because of the tech stack experience. And honestly in terms of raw talent I think the sr devs were better, but it just didn't make up for the lack of tech stack experience.
  - fonix 4y ago
    In your example it the answer may be “none”, but I’d be curious of the amount of tech debt that may have been introduced by the jr vs the sr’s; whether or not sr’s had better intuition.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      Jr introduced far less tech debt because they knew the patterns and best practices around the tech stack where as the Sr developers didn't. So the Sr devs wrote a bunch of really funky react code and the jr dev just wrote normal looking react code.
  - jghn 4y ago
    What sort of time are we talking about on these projects? If you're looking at something that has to be done in a few weeks, sure. In a normal role where I expect the person to stick around for a couple of years I'll take the person with better overall skills every day.
    - JamesBarney 4y ago
      On the order of 4-8 weeks. Original poster used the term fluent for someone with a few weeks to months of experience which both Sr devs had.
brundolf 4y ago
Also nuances about performance, easy-to-make mistakes, historical accidents, workarounds for common issues, etc

nly 4y ago

It's a cute theory, but the reality is most employers want you to be relatively efficient from day dot. I work in a team with a codebase split 50/50 between C# and C++, and if you're not proficient in one of those then the chances of you getting hired, even if you're an incredible programmer, are slim.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Having a C# codebase and being unwilling to hire Java developers seems like unnecessarily constraining yourself.
- metaltyphoon 4y ago
  Depends a lot on what type of software is b ing written. The people that keep beating the drums that Java = C# have not worked with the language extensively enough. So many things outside of basic languages constructs are different. Tooling is also a big hurdle to change too.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    I've worked in both extensively, and there are certainly far more similarities than differences. I've put C# devs on to Java codebases and got them up to speed very quickly. But you still need to have Java pros that know all the gotchas etc. to do the code reviews.
dnissley 4y ago
This is a trait of an employer that I consider a red flag. If they don't understand that most programming languages are pretty similar, and can be picked up quickly by any willing person, they probably don't understand a lot of other things in regards to tech
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Quickly=?
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    "Any willing person"=?
- julianeon 4y ago
  That's not fair. The whole point of "footguns" is that they are not obvious and that the reason more experienced people don't set them off, is because they've directly experienced their results before. Our industry went to the trouble of inventing a whole new language (Rust), which is now being championed by major industry players, because those footguns are so non-obvious. "Trusting" smart people to "just not make mistakes with pointers" was clearly the wrong choice. If you haven't used C and C++ before, it's reasonable to think you're going to make those first-time mistakes with your code inside their codebase. That's a good argument for not hiring you and only hiring experienced C/C++ programmers. In practice, that's exactly what those companies do.
Shorel 4y ago
The reality is that today's job market is not ten-years-ago market. Employers and companies can't find enough developers to satisfy the demand. They should provide a bit of wiggle room and train internally as well. Three months getting into a new language/framework is not that much compared with the cost of hiring.

ld_bic 4y ago

I write COBOL I work 24hrs/week I make $15k/week I also can’t center a div on a web page or do much of anything other then what I do. Specialization IMO is key to highest job satisfaction and highest salary in this industry

greatpostman 4y ago
Interesting, always thought high paying cobol jobs were a myth
- ld_bic 4y ago
  IMO the only way in this industry (without having your own company or something like that) to high-paying gigs is to become more valuable to a company than company is to you. and that you can accomplish only through DEEP specialization
  - varjag 4y ago
    The downside to this of course is the breadth of your next job search (should it come to that) suffers.
    - ld_bic 4y ago
      This on the surface sounds solid but I persobally think most job searches are narrow unless you are doing “career changing” moves. How many good UI/UX colleagues do you have that are good at anything else? How many compiler developers can center a div on the page? I think this “I know a lot of things” is just something we say - terms like “full stack” developer etc… I mostly develop on a computer which isn’t connected to the internet (so no Google, Stackoverflow etc…) and I often think how miniscule fraction of “full stack” developers could perform even the most menial task in any of these “stacks” they apparently know
    - chmod775 4y ago
      If you make in a month what others do in a year, you can retire after 6-8 years and never worry about having to find another job if you play your cards right. Accounting for taxes and moderate expenses, at the end you should be sitting on close to 2m USD. That's more money than the vast majority of people make in their lifetime (after taxes). If you don't plan to live to a hundred you'll be fine even if you don't do any higher-risky investing, slowly spending it.
      - varjag 4y ago
        Expecting a 12x of median industry rate via specialization is not realistic. I'm sure such outliers exist and you possibly know both of them but this is not an actionable advice.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
Interesting- this is contrary to what many people responded when I AskHN'd recently: > Ask HN: How do I learn real-world COBOL? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31906829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31906829 How does one learn to do what you do (write COBOL in the real world to make a great living)?
- bitwize 4y ago
  Those people wrote that because they're making $15k/week and don't want to tank their market value.

nickjj 4y ago

This is very true but there's still is a very big difference between knowing languages like JS, Python, Ruby or Go but then jumping into a place that uses Elixir or a niche language that's different than a lot of other popular languages. For example I took a position to do mostly infrastructure work. Most of their services are written in PHP which I haven't used since the early 2000s. I wouldn't classify myself as a PHP developer. Sometimes I find myself diving into the code to self-solve issues I have that are infrastructure related. My thought process is if I can solve a problem and it's within my scope of things to do I'd much rather just do it than add extra work to another developer on the team. In the worst case scenario someone with actual PHP experience who does the code review will offer suggestions to make the code better. I don't really know PHP but I can look around and navigate the code without issues. There's nothing that looks too foreign and the code is easy to grep to find stuff. It's also not too bad to trace code in a large app and understand the logic. There's also a massive amount of Google results for almost any problem you can think of. It really means for a lot of cases you can combine previous experience and be productive in a similar language without really knowing it. Enough to contribute real code that gets shipped to production. I ended up doing this yesterday where I added an IP whitelist address exempt config option to one of our apps. I wanted to at least toy with the idea of doing IP range detection within a CIDR block. In Python this is really easy, the standard library has functions to do this with 1 line of code. Ruby's implementation is even easier and built into the language. For PHP I had to Google around but found a pretty small custom function to use in less than 2 minutes. For Elixir? Well you have to use a 4 year old+ third party dependency or dive down into Erlang and understand pattern matching and write a bunch of code to manually do the comparisons. Maybe there's a good Elixir solution but it wasn't on the first 3 pages of Google when searching for similar terms as I did for Python, Ruby and PHP. Weirdly enough if you search for "elixir check if ip address is in cidr block range" most of the top results are StackOverflow posts for other languages. There's no contest in comparing the amount of effort it took to get a solution. I know this is 1 just example but I also know when I tried learning Elixir (and did end up writing about 10k lines of code of it) I kept running into situations that took half a day or longer to figure out while actively trying hard to learn and use the language. These problem could be fully solved in a production ready way in 5-10 minutes with Python or Ruby (and I guess PHP too) either by knowing how to solve it in an imperative way or finding nearly a perfect solution when Googling that's digestible enough to where you can fully understand it and apply it back to your problem.

StrayM 4y ago
> For Elixir? Well you have to use a 4 year old+ third party dependency Can we please stop using “4 year old+” as a generally applicable rule to reject libraries? I know “4 year old” seems like forever ago in Ruby or Node (I can’t talk about Python or PHP), but other ecosystems such as Go and Elixir take compatibility seriously and “4 year old” libraries most often just mean they are done: they work for their intended purposes and there are no breaking changes in the language or tooling forcing frivolous updates. I have used 8 year old Erlang libraries in the past with no issues whatsoever.
throwawaymaths 4y ago
Did you try asking on the forums? https://hexdocs.pm/net_address/IP.Subnet.html https://hexdocs.pm/net_address/IP.Subnet.html
- nickjj 4y ago
  > Did you try asking on the forums? Nope, I only looked up the Elixir solution for the sake of my reply here. I haven't worked with Elixir in like 9 months. Based on the docs it says IP.Subnet.is_in only supports IPv4. The Python and Ruby solutions transparently support both. That kind of sums up my Elixir experience (ie. something might partially exist but to really use it will require a lot of extra work). It's also impressive at how infrequently the Elixir docs come up in Google searches. It's strange considering how many words are there and it's the official source of information for the language.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword. Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort, and heaven help you if you need to debug someone else's code", but I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code and tensorflow. Maybe it's just I've worked with shitty python devs and on the other project Google's notoriously bad engineering practices in some of their public facing OS projects (angular, tf)

shocks 4y ago
Ask them during the interview stage. Sometimes a strange/obscure language is the correct choice for a very good (and fun/interesting!) reason.
wtetzner 4y ago
You may be right about many companies’ decisions, but I will say that Clojure is a very practical language. I think you’d just need to ask them why they chose it, and decide for yourself if you think it was a wise decision.
ptttr 4y ago
I understand your worry, but I've had a quite opposite take on this. I think we can agree that it's not that hard to find ANY job as an experienced developer. However it's much more difficult to find a great, satisfying job. For that you need to navigate around a lot of corpo-bullshit type of projects, and Clojure has served me well as a useful filter in doing that. My reasoning is that Clojure is niche enough that when company is using it, you can assume that it's due to a deliberate technical choice, and not just because of its popularity. That tells me two things that are symptomatic, in my opinion, of a healthy tech company culture: - tech decisions are made by engineers, not by top-level executives, - their conclusions and bets align with mine because we all see and agree on Clojure's edge over more popular solutions. Admittedly, there's always a risk that someone just followed the hype and got out of their depth but I think this risk is relatively small, because Clojure's no longer a new kid on a block and choosing a tech stack is a major decision and usually done by senior tech leadership, hopefully less hype driven. Of course, Clojure is no silver bullet and it's just a tool that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Messy codebases are just as possible as in other languages, especially when the team is new to lisps that are very different from mainstream languages, but that's a nature of software development - you learn with the experience. I do cringe when I look at the Clojure code I wrote when I was just starting and wasn't fully grasping Clojure's way of thinking, but the more I use it, the more I come to appreciate how powerful it is. Great intro that made it click for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1DazRK_a0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1DazRK_a0 (Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald, 2019) Having said that, no software project is ever complete and so isn't Clojure as an ecosystem. The tooling is constantly evolving and new patterns are emerging. What's great about Clojure open-source community is that everyone seems to share the desire to harness complexity and Rich Hickey has convinced each one of us at some point that the way to do it is through simplicity https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ Even within Clojure's community there's a diversity of approaches, and I think it's necessary to improve and evolve. The more recent trend, I've noticed is that the community is converging at Data Oriented Programming that's applicable in other languages as well, but has always been at the core of Clojure's mindset that is especially well suited for it. Dropping some links relevant about DOP: https://youtu.be/8Kc55qOgGps?t=4175 https://youtu.be/8Kc55qOgGps?t=4175 (Rafal Dittwald, “Data Oriented Programming” 2022) - whole talk is valuable, but long so I'm linking to the most juicy snippets) https://blog.klipse.tech/dop/2022/06/22/principles-of-dop.html https://blog.klipse.tech/dop/2022/06/22/principles-of-dop.ht... Moreover, Clojure has already grown past the threshold of being just a niche toy and has sufficiently big market that it won't die off anytime soon. When you study history of programming languages, you'll notice that it's enormously difficult thing to do for an emerging player, especially without big corporate backing. And Clojure is as grassroot as it gets: https://clojure.org/about/history https://clojure.org/about/history

throwaway1777 4y ago

These salary numbers in the survey are so low it seems like a joke.

mattyb678 4y ago
My guess is that the salaries of developers outside of the US, and western countries, pull down the averages
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Almost any other western country other than the US and Switzerland will massively pull down the average. Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. I know academics in physics who are effectively chained to the US because they are so used to the huge amount of money. In Germany for example you cannot expect to make more than 70k euro max, probably more like 50-55k euro a year even as a senior software engineer. I don't think a lot of americans appreciate how vastly inflated american wages are
  - housingisaright 4y ago
    Salaries in the eu is most def. Lower than us, but earning 100k with a couple years experience is pretty common in London/Berlin/Scandinavia etc. Biggest difference is that not a lot of people are earning 200k+ salaries in eu.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      100k in Berlin is pretty extreme, Scandinavia and London I can see it more. I live in Hamburg and 100k is basically unheard of.
      - badpun 4y ago
        In Europe, good money is in contracting. For senior devs, salaried jobs are for people who for some reason won't switch to contracts (e.g. they're immigrants and need a full time job for visa purposes)
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    > Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. Funny way to spell "fairly compensated".
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      I didn't spell it wrong, you are suggesting a different idea. Own up to it rather than using a lame linguistic deflection tactic. It is beyond fair compensation, because the standard of living is fine in Europe, even though I know a lot of americans think we live in squalor. The pay in the US is beyond what can possibly be expected in other developed countries.
      - throwaway675309 4y ago
        You'd be singing a different tune if you were a US citizen with our complete lack of socialized safety net, inadequate health care system, etc etc. I'm sorry as a non-US citizen that you're so poorly compensated, but clearly the market and corporations can afford to pay much better than they do in Europe.
        adventured 4y ago
        > our complete lack of socialized safety net The US spends a larger share of its GDP on its social safety net than Canada does. What you're confused about is the difference between what a nation spends and what it gets for that spending. The US doesn't lack a social safety net, it has exceptionally incompetent government systems at the state and federal level while simultaneously spending a very large sum on its mediocre social safety net. US Government systems spend like European welfare states and the US doesn't get the same results from that spending. If the poorest 1/4 of the population being covered by wildly expensive (for the taxpayer), free healthcare isn't part of a social safety net, then what qualifies exactly? EBT (free food for the poor, aka food stamps) and Housing First are two other prominent social safety net programs. The US spends an enormous amount of money on EBT ($111b just at the federal level for 2021). The US housing first program was so successful it brought the US homelessness rate down to approximately where France and Canada are at. Social Security and Medicare are social safety net programs, and the two largest by cost in world history. Neither program pays for itself properly, it's subsidized by taxpayers (and more so by the day).
  - roguas 4y ago
    Ok, having recently worked in Germany its a bit overexaggerated. I think now, senior engineers can be reaching 80-110k quite easily. Secondly, american wages are not inflated but are high due to original demand being in US.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Where did you work in Germany? I've never heard of a 100k wage. My wife is a senior design engineer and she makes 55k in Hamburg
- jcadam 4y ago
  I have no idea why, but it seems like software engineering salaries in the UK (from what I've seen in job listings for remote work as an American) are near the lowest in the first world (yes, even when adjusting for GBP/USD exchange rate).
eulers_secret 4y ago
As the other poster said, it's due to other countries confounding the data. Check this for example: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-by-developer-type https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... You can specify the location - the salaries are more inline with what you'd expect if you select the USA. Also note that 8,540 of 37,546 respondents are from the US - so MOST of this data is not relevant to the USA.

thebigspacefuck 4y ago

The SO chart shows Erlang is actually highest at $120K salary. Also note the median years of experience is 13. Making $110K after 13 years is not all that great. The chart would be more useful if it showed a trajectory over time for each language. Overall I don’t think this chart should influence anyone’s decision to pick a programming language. I worked with a few teams using Clojure and there was nothing magical about it. One of the Clojure teams’ API was very thoughtfully done and reliable. Another Clojure team s’ API was a mess and caused loads of issues. I suspect the first team chose Clojure organically and the second team picked it due the SO salary.

yomkippur 4y ago
The problem is that learning a niche language like Clojure should demand a higher salary but it doesn't. Companies realize they can get an existing experienced developer to learn it. It's also not wise to jump ship to a niche language like this unless you really have the funding for it and even then, the talent pool is much smaller and you find yourself its not an employers market in that niche. So as a business owner by choosing clojure: - I can't afford to lose experienced clojure devs but my budget is fixed - I am going to be constantly requiring onboarding, training existing non-clojure devs - I simply cannot reverse this decision. To me the third point is the biggest risk but back to your point, it can become unmanageable unless you have the best and the brightest. In any other language, you could still operate the business with middle of the pack but with these niche languages the risks are just much higher. It would require a Product Manager or even a CTO with extensive clojure background and those would be even harder to find and keep. Like the SO survey shows, not everybody is willing to pay top dollars for a clojure dev and this should make anyone pause before jumping into it. I personally liked clojure but the tooling was still painful like working with Java. Readability wise its a nightmare and if your entire team quits, there is a very good chance your business will fail, as it is that much harder to scale up your team or find experienced talent who now feel they are owed a much higher wages (which they should). Nim on the other hand is more promising. It doesn't have any radical shifts, it still reads like Python and its very fast. But it doesn't even show up in the SO survey which makes me think its far too early.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  I've heard the argument that using niche tech is a good way to retain good engineers who you'd pay a lot anyways
  - hiptobecubic 4y ago
    The Haskell community refers to this as "the Haskell tax," although I think all niche languages suffer it.
celdon25 4y ago
I was one of the few professional F# devs at a time when F# was ranked #1 in pay (though that wasn't why I used F#). Spoiler alert: The pay difference is not large enough to be worth making a career decision off of. Use the languages you are the most happy with. Niche languages that get paid well don't seem to have a steady spot on the list. You can't get paid the big bucks if you get forced out of a job for poor performance, and in this economy, expect that to be a real risk.

nickjj 4y ago
> IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword. Does that mean you can do something to make it transparently support IPv4 and IPv6 even though the docs mentions it only supports IPv4? Will it be more than 1 line of code? > Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort..." I found it to be the opposite approach. The last time I wanted to increment a counter outside of a nested loop in Elixir it sprawled into a multi-week conversation with the author of Elixir, a git repo with 100+ programming language examples to solve the same problem[0] and a proposal on potentially altering Elixir itself to make this process a bit easier. The Python solution was about 2 minutes typing into my code editor and moving on with life. Elixir solution: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/blob/master/elixir/map_reduce.exs https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/bl... Python solution: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/blob/master/python/for-in.py https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal/bl... I'm not saying either language is better than the other but there's certain things that can done a lot easier in Python and on the flip side I'm sure there's things you can do a lot easier in Elixir. I found in practice for me personally when building typical web apps I kept running into roadblocks left and right with Elixir where as I never had these issues with Python or Ruby. That's why I stopped using Elixir. > I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code I think that'll happen with any big framework, especially if you haven't contributed a ton of code to it. The Rails code base can be intimidating too and Phoenix's code isn't any more approachable to someone who isn't already at the high end of expert with the language. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal https://github.com/nickjj/nested-data-structure-traversal
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I mean to be quite honest I remember this problem and all I could think of was "this being hard is a sign that the data structure is poorly designed. But I also remember giving you a four line code sample using the process dictionary that you could have used, because this was "clearly an exceptionally pathologic data structure".
  - nickjj 4y ago
    Oh yeah I remember your reply (not word for word but the approach of using it). If you search around for using process dictionary it seems to go against the grain of Elixir since it introduces mutable state which is fundamentally against what the language provides. It did lead to much easier to understand code because it brings the language more in line with how other languages work where you can update a variable outside of a specific scope. Maybe it's a good example of the idea of "sharp knives" but applied to Elixir instead of Ruby. I don't think the data structure was that crazy or rare. It boiled down to looping over 2 lists and wanting to keep an independent count of each one.